1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to image composing, and particularly to a method and apparatus of automatically composing scanned images.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Digitizing devices, such as scanners and digital cameras, convert photos, artwork, and the raw materials of the real world into digital data, which can be edited, processed, manipulated, or stored by specific application programs. Flatbed scanner is one of the most common types of scanners, which comes in many shapes and sizes. There is a downward trend in size of scanners, especially those used at home or office when economy and space are taken into consideration. However, these downsized scanners or normal sized scanners having, for example, a platen in standard A4 size, are rendered useless when scanning an original document larger than its platen size. In order to overcome this disadvantage, someone proposes a composing method that is implemented by a software program to join up two or more consecutively scanned digitized documents. This composing method disadvantageously requires user's interaction, in which the user makes an effort to place the large-sized document twice on the platen. Furthermore, at least some overlap between these two placements is required to guarantee the success in composing a resultant large-sized scan by the composing method. Moreover, the scanning task will become hard work when scanning a great number of large-sized documents in this conventional way. It is, therefore, desirable to propose an apparatus that automatically scans large-sized documents in small-sized scanners effortlessly without users'interaction.